Despite our pandemic-induced economic downturn; month over month, I continue to see strong growth and diversification. Between 2019 and 2020, this month is an all-time high for montly side income; and my investment portfolio continues to show strong growth, beating my month-over-month 6.5% growth target, keeping on track with my nutters growth target rate.
Let's not bury the lead; here's what I'm looking at for the month of August:
Total gross revenue for the month: $1,461.67. This is approaching half of my monthly take-home salary from my day job...
You'll notice lots of changes to the line items for the various projects compared to this month; I cut a lot of inactive projects from the list and added new ones to keep it up-to-date and as concise/condensed as possible. I'll get into that in a bit.
For now, let's break down the income:
- $581 from Nicehash mining. This month has seen an INSANE jump in cryptocurrency mining profitability! As the crypto market seems to boom during the fiat market downturn, mining with nicehash has been my single largest earner this month! And this all gets dumped into my crypto portfolio on Coinsquare! Not only that, but I finally (mostly) solved the stability issues that have been plaguing me since I updated my Nicehash software version!
- $330 in online 3D Print sales between my three sales channels (Ebay, Shopify, and Bonanza, all of which have seen sales this month). This project is surprisingly my second biggest earner this month, beating out even my flipping venture. This is surprising, since I've long deprioritized this project. Good to know it can still be an earner though!
- $311 from flipping (reselling items at a profit). This project has seen a continued downtrend in month-on-month income; and I've deprioritized projects like this anyway--too much time-per-sale investment. I'm trying to transition to more passive-income style projects. Nontheless, my active listings have remained roughly the same, so this is interesting.
- $86.06 net gain from my three trading bots--two instances of my homebrew trading bot (Bittrex, Binance) and one instance of Gekko (Poloniex). The Poloniex bot shows a loss; I should note that the actual BTC value is a net profit, but the value of BTC had dropped a bit lower, making it look like it was not profitable. The setting of my homebrew bots to use 90 days of history instead of 30 is really straightening them out for making winning trades; and I removed the volume modifier.
- $60.92 from my Print on Demand sales channels (Redbubble, Society6, and TeePublic). You'll notice that the latter two are new; more on that later in the post.
- $46.28 from my Youtube channel's ad revenue! My first full month of ad revenue!
- $12.96 from Shapeways, a 3D Print on Demand service
- $12.17 from Amazon Associates; affiliate links used in conjunction with my Youtube videos
- $7.45 from Burstcoin mining
- $6.02 from MyMiniFactory 3d model sales
As you can see, I am really starting to diversify my income streams!
I removed some old, inactive projects; things like Turbosquid and the Unity Asset Store. At the same time, you'll notice some new line items:
- Society6 and TeePublic, two print-on-demand sites that join Redbubble in forming my base trifecta of print-on-demand platforms that I try and sell designs and photos on. I'm really pushing hard on the Print on Demand front now; and was one of my main focuses throughout the month of August. I expanded to these two platforms and (mostly) brought them up to parity with Redbubble. The goal is to slowly add the other 8 ish main PoD sites so that I am active and present on all, and grow my Print on Demand hustle into one of my main earners
- Patreon, now that I have my Patreon fully set up. No takers/income yet, but I have my six tiers fully set up and am actively promoting it in my Youtube videos
So aside from that, lots to talk about this past month:
This was my first full month of Youtube ad revenue, which is exciting! It's roughly on par with what I projected it to be.
One particular interesting thing that happened during this past week, was my latest video--about the Tesla Cybertruck being interesting as an overlanding vehicle--got the attention of a writer for CleanTechnica, and was actually featured in one of their articles!
As my channel continues to grow, here's the quick details on what I accomplished with my channel this past month:
- Published four new videos, keeping on track with my goal of 4 videos per month (one a week basically)
- Currently at 1,138 subscribers; up 120 over last month
- Subscriber growth rate: 11.79%; down from last month's 17% growth rate
- Average daily views over last month: 345
- Average daily subscribers over last month: 4
- Had my first 1,000 view day (the day the aforementioned article was published)
As mentioned last month, and alluded to earlier this post; this past month, I've really started to adjust my project priorities and put a lot of emphasis on projects that are more passive in nature. Projects that I can feck off for a month at a time, and stuff will still continue to generate revenue; not requiring me to do anything (fulfill orders, etc).
As such, work items like replacing my flipping listings has been deprioritized. I go by a 5-tier importance ranking for all tasks:
- Blue, Minimal Importance: Stuff that is not important to get done, can sit around in the queue for as long as needed.
- Green, Light Importance: Stuff that would be nice to get done sooner rather than later, but is not priority enough to focus on short-term
- Yellow, Moderate Importance: Stuff that should get done in the near future; forms the bulk of my work items. If it's yellow, ideally I'd like to get it done within the month it was added to my work item list
- Orange, Heavy Importance: Stuff that needs to get done sooner rather than later; usually resulting in me losing revenue if not done. Things like starting customer orders on the 3d printer, shipping orders, rewriting deprecated APIs
- Red, Severe Importance: Stuff at the top of the work queue that must be done immediately, or there will be an immediate loss of revenue--shipping overdue orders, dealing with custom order requests, that sort of thing.
I have deranked flipping from Yellow to Green.
Going forward, you'll continue to see some major focus on the passive income projects. Print on Demand (including Shapeways), MyMiniFactory for 3d model sales, cryptocurrency mining & trading, affiliate marketing to a lesser extent (as it's just included as part of my Youtube videos). My Youtube project is really the only major project I'm continuing with a heavy focus on, that requires huge time investments--because I really believe in what I'm doing with the channel. I definitely feel less stressed now that I have batched my project priorities more in line with my future goals.
With my cryptocurrency projects, I think I finally have my homebrew trading bot in a stable state. Both instances of it have seen a positive growth rate this past month, due to having a more stable set of backtesting data to use (90 days instead of 30). Could just be an off month; but I'll let it play out in the future and continue making tweaks. (One such tweak is to scale up the order timeout based on how my current fund stacks up against my starting value by orders of magnitude. If my current fund is 2x my starting value, the timeout will wait twice as long)
I do have to rewrite my Bittrex API soon, as I'm on a deprecated version that will no longer work as of the end of September...
With my Binance referrals; I'm only up 4 referrals this month--putting me squarely at 100--but I'm consistently getting referral income from people trading now. I've made about $8 just in referral income! (This gets rolled into my Binance profit line item)
On to my workload projection from last month, and how I fared this month!
- At least 4 Youtube videos
Yep! - Reach and maintain approximately 200 active Flipping listings (holding pattern)
Been slowly climbing up towards this number, as I fluctuate between sales and new listings being added - 2x Shapeways Listings (carryover from last month's work items)
Yep! I did even more than what I needed actually; as there is overlap between MyMiniFactory and Shapeways work--why not upload to both - Patreon
implementation. As mentioned, this is one of my next work items, and
will be the major project of the month of August. Still needs a bit of
tweaking with my planned patreon reward tiers
Fully implemented and live! No patrons yet though - 4x Redbubble Listings
Beat this by a far margin! More along the lines of 10-12, PLUS two new sales channels in the form of Society6 and TeePublic - 4x MyMiniFactory Listings
Yep!
Managed to match or outright outperform my work item goals for the month of August (except for the flipping aspect, which was deprioritized); hopefully I can keep up that momentum in September! Here's my September work item goals:
- At least 4 new Youtube videos
- Continue to climb towards a holding pattern of 200 active flipping listings
- Migrate Bittrex API on my homebrew trading bot to the newest version
- 3x new MyMiniFactory listings
- 2x new Print on Demand listings
- Ensure all 3D Print listings are properly imported from Shopify to Bonanza
Nothing too crazy, should be able to hit all of these goals!
And finally, we move on to the investment portion of the post:
As to not make this post too long, I'll quickly bullet-point the statistics:
- Month-on-month portfolio growth of 13.04%, beating my target of 6.5% for another month
- Manual algo trading on Coinsquare is up by 26.06% in BTC value over my baseline. Finding it harder to get trades filled as the value grows
- Debts continue to be paid down rather than actively investing (Car loan, student loans, credit card)
That about wraps up this month's post! Make sure you follow me so you get notified of next month's post. Cheers!
If you find these posts helpful, and you are interested in cryptocurrency, try signing up for Binance! It's a widely-known cyrptocurrency exchange (think stock exchange, but for crypto). It's free to do so, and by using my referral link we'll both earn 10% of any trading fees you pay.
https://www.binance.com/en/register?ref=WZKZ16ZW
See you next post!
#financialfreedom #financiallyindependent #financialindependence #financialindependenceretireearly #passiveincomeinvesting #passiveincomestream #passiveincome #sidegig #sidehustles #sidehustle #wealth #makingmoney #wealthbuilding #incomestreams #incomestream #passiveincomeideas #passiveincomestreams #passiveincomeclub #passiveincometips #passiveincomemethods #sidehustleideas #sidehustler #sidehustlers #sidegigs #sidegiglife #sidegigsuccess #passiveincomesuccess #sidehustlesuccess #sidegighustle #entrepeneur #creatingwealth #investmentportfolio #income